Hello heroes! I wanted to take some time and reflect on how I’ve been feeling these last few years and to vocalize a thought that I believe many people have. Stop me if you’ve had this feeling before: a mountain of work and imminent deadlines looms before you, filling up your mind with so much anxiety that it’s paralyzing. No matter what you do, you just can’t find the will to begin the project. It doesn’t matter how excited you are about the work or what the consequences may be of not doing the thing. It doesn’t matter that you are passionate about this project or that you nail it every time you do this work. There is just no budging. You worry that reaching out to your friends and family will just make them think that you’re a burden or ungrateful for the opportunity you’ve been given to work in a field or on a craft that you genuinely love so you sit there in stasis. Every day ticks by, the deadline gets closer, and no matter how scary it is, how important it is, you just can’t move. You sit down to do the work and instead open a YouTube tab and suddenly it’s 3am and you haven’t written anything. Finally the day before the deadline arrives—or the day after—and you have no choice but to roll up your sleeves and work until it's done, even if that’s a 36 hour process.

This happens to me a lot, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I’ve spent my whole life dealing with this pattern of procrastination and scrambling. When I was younger, and my projects were a lot shorter, it didn’t seem to bother me as much. I could knock out an essay in an hour or two the morning before it was due and still get an A. I could ace a test without ever studying. Nothing seemed challenging so I piled things on, as much as I could cram into my schedule. This behavior followed me into adulthood and persists until this day. It’s a habit I’m trying to break myself of because I can feel how it saps my life of joy and trying to be so many things at one time reduces the quality of my work across the board.

This piling is the reason I haven’t finished my second novel yet, or the other three I have in my work-in-progress bin. It’s why I’m always up all night the night before finishing my freelance editing projects and why deadline days have to be blocked out on my calendar. It hurts my relationships with myself and the people I love most of all, and I have been doing my best these past few months to break this cycle.

This is going to sound counterintuitive, but part of how I’ve been improving my mental, physical, social, and work health has been through rest. I know that sounds wrong after complaining about procrastinating above, but resting is not the same as procrastinating. I have been conditioned to view constant work as the path to achieving my potential but the lack of organized time leads to my burning out and a lot of other nasty side effects like irritability, depression, issues with memory, and other impacts to my general well-being.

I’ve been studying a few techniques over the last few months to improve my relationship with my workload and my need to rest and I wanted to share some of these here with you:

Boundaries: Rest is something we all need to do, and not just when we’re sleeping. Even saying that now I feel a twinge of guilt and uneasiness, but it’s true. This guilt stems from my desire to be a people pleaser and my refusal to set boundaries for myself. I want people to think I’m useful and I hate telling people no, but I am starting to realize the truth in those cliche sayings about pouring from an empty cup or putting on someone else’s oxygen mask before securing my own. My refusal to establish boundaries with the people in my life, the amount of projects I take on, and my schedule messes with my time management and necessitates my mad dashes to finish things on time. You have to be willing to block out your time for things and stick to those blocks. Part of the paralysis I feel when looking at my massive work-in-progress pile is due to the fact that I don’t know when I’m going to do it all and the fact that those deadlines are far off means I can blow them off if someone needs something from me. One of the hardest parts about being a writer is being my own timekeeper. I don’t have a time clock looking at my face to tell me this is work time. I have to be the person responsible for that and until recently I was being a pretty poor manager. I would work on whatever was directly in front of me until something else took its place and the work began to feel like an unending stream because I didn’t have set boundaries to work within. You have to organize your time and you have to be willing to say to yourself and people that this is the time I do this and I can’t move it unless it's an emergency. I’ve started experimenting with an actual work schedule, instead of waking up whenever, working on whatever, and stopping whenever. This structure has been making my writing more consistent and I think better quality and I feel less guilty when I don’t spend all night working on something. It’s still a work in progress, but I feel like it is improving my mental health.

Relaxing: This was a hard one to start implementing and I still don’t feel like I’ve quite mastered it. Basically when I used to “rest” I would try to find something productive and work-related to do while I was away from my desk. I would answer emails or slack messages while trying to watch scary movies with my wife. I would jot down notes and outlines in my phone while trying to play video games, and just never disconnect from the mountain of work in my face. This meant that I never really just relaxed and rested. You have to be willing to use your rest time as rest time. That can be as a leisure activity that you take joy in: reading, playing games, taking a spa day, going to a movie or just taking a day to completely separate yourself from the work in your schedule. Give yourself a break and don’t just step away from your keyboard to do work on the side. This one is hard for me and it’s a pain point in a lot of my relationships, but it is one that I am working on.

Meditation/Self-Reflection: Part of the rest I’ve been giving myself includes journaling and mindful yoga practice. These are uninterrupted periods of time that I set aside the backlog of work I need to finish, the anxiety I have about money, the worry I have about being a good partner and friend, and just let my mind wander without expectation. My friend Pita at Pita Yoga is an excellent yoga instructor for this kind of free thought. She encourages me to focus on my breathing and to set an intention for just the yoga practice. Nothing beyond the hour we spend together matters during that hour. It rejuvenates my brain—even if all the deep breaths remind me that I don’t breathe nearly enough in my day-to-day life. Journaling does a lot of the same work for me. It gives me space to dump the information that is clinging to the inside of my brain and making me anxious and afraid to rest. It’s almost like transferring it from my mind onto paper pulls the emotion out and leaves the fact of what needs to be done somewhere I can reference it and eventually check it off.

Seriously, consider signing up for one of her in-person or online classes. She’s great!

Communicating: This kind of ties in with boundaries, but I have spent a lot of my life believing that I cannot pass any of the burden of existence off on anyone else. I had to be strong enough to carry that weight alone because if I switched from being useful to becoming extra stress for someone else, I was no longer a person worthy of love. Which is insane, because I would never hold another human being to that expectation. Having someone that you can unload your burdens to is healthy and part of being a good partner. I have often felt like I shouldn’t add to anyone’s emotional toll but holding it inside myself has just been eroding the walls of my soul. I’ve been working to be better at telling people what’s bothering me, what I’m afraid of, and what tasks I need help with. I still have a lot of growing to do in this department, but it is helping me take the time I need to rest when I need it.

Sorry. I know that was a lot to unload in a fun blog post, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts and techniques with you in the hope that if you feel the same way I do, you don’t have to try to heal from it alone. And I wanted to share some of my own burden instead of carrying it myself. This year has been an important year of growth and learning for me. I am already making better habits and I can’t wait to see how my healing process continues. Of course I’ll keep sharing fiction and reviews and other entertaining blog posts as the year continues, but I hope you’ll indulge me with the occasional update about my journey. Thank you all for reading and I will see you next time!